Monday, February 21, 2011

Jessee Reviews Ethical Imperialism

Dr. Erin Jessee of Simon Fraser University reviews Ethical Imperialism for the Oral History Review. [First published online February 15, 2011, doi:10.1093/ohr/ohr027.]

She finds the book "an impressive assessment of IRBs, from their tenuous beginnings in the early 1960s as a practical response to a perceived threat to the public from medical research to its present status as a threat to academic freedom in the social sciences" and "a significant contribution to those oral historians and related practitioners who would seek to challenge IRB's right and ability to adequately evaluate their research projects, particularly before the research has been conducted."

Friday, February 18, 2011

Anxious Pessimism on UK's New Framework for Research Ethics

In March 2010, the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) released its Framework for Research Ethics (FRE) as a successor to its 2005 Research Ethics Framework (REF).

David Erdos kindly alerted me to the November 2010 (Volume 15, Issue 4) issue of Sociological Research Online, which devotes a special section to essays about the new framework.

The six essays in the section suggest that British sociologists are wary of their research ethics committees and the expanded authority granted to them by the new framework.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Cautious Optimism on Canada's TCPS2

Ted Palys and John Lowman of the School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, find that the second edition of Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS2), released in December 2010, offers significant improvements over the first edition of 1998.

[Ted Palys and John Lowman, "What's Been Did and What's Been Hid: Reflections on TCPS2," 18 January 2011]

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Library Research Round Table Calls for Papers on IRBs

Melora Norman kindly forwarded the following:

Call for Presentations

2011 Library Research Round Table Forums at ALA Annual Conference,
New Orleans, LA
June 23-28,2011

The Library Research Round Table (LRRT) will sponsor the Chair’s Research Forum at the 2011 American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA (June 23-28). The LRRT Forums are a set of programs at the ALA Annual Conference featuring presentations of LIS research, in progress or completed, followed by discussion.

Chair’s Forum Topic: Institutional Review Boards